Toby Grey has never been one to hold back. A multilingual singer whose music travels readily across borders, the Lagos-bred artist has built her reputation on an Afrobeats, R&B and dancehall sound that feels at once global and intimately personal. Now, with her latest single “I Am Free,” she takes her most daring creative step yet, delivering a full-throated spiritual testimony set to music.
Fluent in both French and English, Grey has long prided herself on existing in the spaces between cultures. Her stage name speaks to precisely that quality: an artist who refuses to be fixed to one identity, one language, or one sound. She first came to widespread attention in 2015 with a viral cover of Kiss Daniel’s “Woju,” and has been steadily expanding her audience ever since. Yet nothing in her catalogue quite prepares the listener for the raw candour of “I Am Free.”
The track is, in Grey’s own telling, a testimony, one that had been building inside her for far too long to stay quiet. She sings of wandering through life without direction, hope, or light, before being found by a love she describes as sovereign and unearned. Chains, she says, were broken; curses destroyed. In the song’s imagery, the old life – its mistakes, pain and shame – has been wiped clean. What remains is freedom, and a joy she is neither willing nor able to conceal.
Musically, the single carries the warmth and melodic confidence that has become Grey’s hallmark, while the lyrical register shifts into something altogether more devotional. Where the Spirit of the Lord is found, she sings, chains break and walls fall down. It is a bold statement from an artist clearly uninterested in packaging her faith in palatable metaphor. The freedom she describes is, she insists, both real and permanent.
“I Am Free” is out now via ONErpm and streaming on all major platforms.
